Curtis Brown

Lead Consultant

Curtis Brown joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2012. His specialist areas include End User Compute solutions and Virtual Infrastructure design and implementation with particular strength in VDI, storage integration, backup and Disaster Recovery design/implementation. He was awarded VMware vExpert 2019.

What is your role at Xtravirt

Lead Consultant – Running around different customers designing, implementing or helping fix IT solutions.

What attracted you to Xtravirt

The opportunity to do varied, interesting work delivering solutions with some really smart cookies!

Leadership style

I tend to prefer a collaborative style – given the level of the guys we have, we’re all seriously motivated people anyway.

Functional or technical skills

Technology wise, I’m pretty broad – I’ve been Microsoft certified since October ’97 and VMware certified since June 2006. Beyond this, I’ve been involved in End User Compute, Business Continuity and Infrastructure (particularly server and SAN/NAS) for over 20 years. On the VMware side, I’ve been awarded VMware vExpert for five years running (2015-2019).

What’s your favourite part of your job?

A combination of the technical challenge as well as visiting different people and places.

People would be surprised to hear that I worked as …

A warehouseman and shelf stacker at Sainsburys.

First car?

1979 Mini. In yellow and grey primer. Used more oil than petrol…

I have lived/work in the following cities:

I’ve always lived in/around Leicester, but I’ve worked in a long list of places between Seattle, USA and Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Hobbies

Reading and watching a good movie. Particularly Science Fiction, Thrillers and action films. Also, I’m into history and aviation.

What was your first job?

My first IT job (after being a warehouseman as a student) was working on a customer facing computer support helpdesk for a large UK electrical retailer. Lots of Microsoft Windows 95.